Bernie Sanders raised more money, and Beto O’Rourke is giving them a run for their money

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Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) speaks during a town hall meeting at Canyon Springs High School in March 2019 in North Las Vegas, Nevada. Harris, who is campaigning for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president, reported raising more than $12 million in the first three months of 2019. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

Sen. Kamala Harris raised just over $12 million in the first three months of 2019, thanks to donations from tech moguls and movie stars like Ben Affleck, Elizabeth Banks and Eva Longoria, putting her second in the Democratic presidential candidates’ scramble for cash.

Only Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont raised more than Harris, taking in $18.2 million in the first quarter of the year. And several other Senate contenders transferred large amounts of money from their previous campaign accounts.

Both should be looking over their shoulders: Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas raised $9.4 million over just two weeks — about a quarter of the time Harris was in the running. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg beat earlier expectations with $7.1 million, an impressive showing for a candidate who was all but unknown a month ago.

The fundraising reports released by the Federal Election Commission Monday night give observers the first official snapshot of the financial race — and show Harris in a strong but not commanding position in the primary.

The first-term senator spent about $4.3 million as her White House bid got off the ground, and ended March with just under $9 million in the bank after transferring $1.2 million from her Senate account.

In addition to Sanders, who has $15.7 million on hand, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand have larger cash reserves than Harris — $11.2 million and $10 million — thanks to large amounts they transferred from their Senate committees. Former Rep. John Delaney, a wealthy but long-shot candidate, also has $10.6 million on hand, most of it loaned from his personal funds.

Meanwhile, President Trump’s fundraising juggernaut dwarfed his Democratic opponents, bringing in about $30 million over the quarter and leaving him with $40 million to spend. That’s in part because the Democratic field was fractured between nearly 20 candidates while Trump had Republican donors almost completely to himself.

Overall, the Democratic first quarter numbers are lower than the amounts raised by leading candidates in past elections — in the first three months of 2007, for example, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton each raised more than $25 million. This year’s relatively underwhelming figures could be due to donors waiting to see which of the long list of 2020 contenders emerges as the likeliest to defeat Trump, said Doug Herman, a Democratic strategist in Los Angeles who isn’t working for any of them.

“Amongst the Democratic electorate, the number one thing folks are looking for is who can beat the president,” Herman said. “If you’ve got more than 15 candidates in the race, that is an unanswerable question today.”

Harris’ report shows that she raked in both big checks from big-name donors and tons of small-dollar online donations. More than a third of her total, $4.4 million, came from donors who gave $200 or less. About 98 percent of Harris’ contributions were less than $100, and the online average donation was $28, according to her campaign — although those figures could not be independently confirmed because small donations don’t need to be reported individually to the FEC.

Sanders, O’Rourke, and Buttigieg all reported taking in more money than Harris from small donors, and Warren raised roughly the same amount, $4.2 million.

At the same time, Harris reported maximum donations from Hollywood icons. In addition to Affleck, Banks and Longoria, filmmakers Lee Daniels and Brian Grazer and TV showrunners Shonda Rhimes and Jenni Konner donated to her campaign. Other top Harris donors include former Disney and Dreamworks executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, former Warner Brothers chairman and CEO Kevin Tsujihara and Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad.

She also got hundreds of thousands of dollars from employees of several prominent law firms, including DLA Piper and Venable, where her husband Douglas Emhoff has been an intellectual property attorney.

More than half of the $7.6 million Harris raised in individual large contributions came from Californians, and her two biggest moneymaking cities were San Francisco and Los Angeles, according to a Bay Area News Group analysis of her fundraising.

Almost a fourth of Harris’ spending over the quarter, $1 million, went to digital advertising, much of it on Facebook and Google ads. It’s a sign of how digital ad space has become one of the biggest battlegrounds of the presidential race. Her other largest expenses came for event planning, including her blowout January rally in Oakland, which attracted 20,000 people.

The reports show that California continues to play its traditional role as an ATM for Democratic candidates. In addition to Harris, Sanders and Buttigieg reported raising more money in individual itemized contributions from Californians than from any other state — and all of the party’s hopefuls had the Golden State as one of their top three sources of funds.

In addition to Harris, Booker did well among top tech executives, getting donations from Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman and Benioff.

Among individual itemized donors who listed their employer as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google or Alphabet, Harris led with almost $52,000 and was closely followed by Sanders at $46,500. Surprisingly, Warren — who has called for breaking up those companies — came in third among their employees, with almost $39,500 in donations.

East Bay Rep. Eric Swalwell, the other Californian in the presidential race, didn’t have to report fundraising numbers for his nascent White House bid because he only got in the race a week ago. But the FEC report for his congressional campaign shows that he took in $1.1 million in the first three months of 2019 and transferred $700,000 to his presidential campaign, leaving more than $1.6 million in the bank.

Casey Tolan covers national politics and the Trump administration for the Bay Area News Group. Previously, he was a reporter for the news website Fusion, where he covered criminal justice, immigration, and politics. His reporting has also been published in CNN, Slate, the Village Voice, the Texas Observer, the Daily Beast and other news outlets. Casey grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and graduated from Columbia University.

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